The media office of former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has cautioned opposition political actors against embracing what it describes as a self-defeating and intellectually dishonest narrative insisting that the 2027 presidential ticket must be zoned exclusively to the South.
In a statement issued by Olusola Sanni, media aide to Atiku, the camp argued that while the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) may understandably retain its southern presidential configuration around incumbent President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, it would amount to political miscalculation for the opposition to adopt the same approach without a clear-eyed assessment of Nigeria's electoral realities.
According to the statement, politics must be guided by strategy, coalition-building, and electoral arithmetic — not emotional rhetoric or selective moral arguments.
“The first and most obvious question is this: how does a Southern opposition candidate realistically unseat a sitting Southern president? Nigerian political history offers no precedent for such an outcome. No incumbent president has ever been defeated by an opposition challenger from the same geopolitical bloc. To insist otherwise is to enter the race already disadvantaged,” the statement said.
The Atiku camp further contended that the moral argument being advanced in favour of southern zoning does not withstand objective scrutiny.
“By 2027, the South would have held presidential power for approximately 18 years in the Fourth Republic, compared to about 10 years for the North. Should the South retain power for another four years, that imbalance would become even more pronounced. It is therefore difficult to reconcile the current argument for equity with a proposal that further widens an existing disparity,” the statement added.
The statement also accused some political actors of selective memory and political opportunism, particularly those who abandoned the zoning principle in 2011 following the death of President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua, but now present it as an inviolable political doctrine.
“It is intellectually dishonest for those who enthusiastically supported a Southern presidency under Goodluck Jonathan in 2011 — despite the North's legitimate expectation under the informal zoning arrangement — to suddenly posture as defenders of rotational justice. Principles cannot become sacred only when they align with personal ambition,” it stated.
While affirming that the Southeast's aspiration to produce a president remains legitimate and deserving of serious national engagement, the statement cautioned against reducing that aspiration to what it termed “transactional political bargaining.”
“The Southeast deserves a credible, sustainable pathway to national leadership — not symbolic tokenism or bespoke political arrangements designed to serve the ambition of a single individual,” the statement said.
The Atiku camp concluded by urging the opposition to prioritise the formation of a broad and credible national coalition capable of defeating the incumbent, rather than embracing narratives that could inadvertently strengthen President Tinubu's re-election chances.
“Defeating an incumbent president requires realism, not romanticism; strategy, not sentiment; honesty, not selective memory. The opposition must decide whether its objective is to make an emotional statement or to genuinely win power.”
